No More Parting For The Middle Class

I haven’t blogged for 2 weeks. It’s been hectic as hell getting everything ready for our official opening tomorrow: Thursday March 28th 6 till 8pm come help us celebrate all we have achieved.

Just to have a year in a real prestigious art gallery is quite something: our work on show: our little Moss Side story. Huge artists would kill for that space. One of the Whitworth staff came up with a great idea today linked to people doing their clubbing memoirs. What if people send them from all over the world and we link them up on a map. How far can the Reno go? Imagine someone telling theirs about Studio 54. They want us to do workshops with teenagers. They’ve got all kinds of ideas for us. And it is wonderful to see people sat on our sofas laughing and crying at our memoirs.

I wanted to burn the place down over the weekend. I have to deal with all kinds of bureaucracy. Sometimes it is like starring in an episode of The Office. But the Reno 12 came to my aid on Monday and we sat in the sun on the café balcony laughing with our rude selves till they had to come and ask me where I wanted the tablet putting that will show our entire website, including my blogs. Today me and the Reno 12 made the most beautiful huge collage of loads of our Reno teen photos. Bring yours if you went and we will scan the original and add the copy to our wall. 

I’ve had some amazing conversations with some amazing people who have come to visit it. My favourite is with 6 teenagers from Cumbria. They were enthralled with our story. It reflected their story but their place to chill is the hills they don’t have a Reno. A common story is no sense of community. We don’t know how lucky we were to have a building we called our own, that we could go back to time and again. That stored our energy till we returned. And this mixed race lad, 23, who was brought up in the country and his mum was still ostracised in this day and age. How long is 23 years ago when he was born. To tired to work it out. But interestingly it is his black dad who is the most racist because he doesn’t want him to associate with his black side because that will pull him down. So in true teenage rebellion, well he’s a bit older, he has locks and is a rapper. I said if he proves he is good he could do show for us.

What we can do in our space is limitless. And I hope you will join us in shaping it’s future. Once we get our opening out of the way tomorrow night, the Reno 12 agree we should concentrate on lighting to give it more of a club atmosphere a place to chill and be artists. It is time to relax with each other, you included, and not be shy about the notions that run around in our head. Let’s make our space look amazing as our year progresses.

I really hope you will join us tomorrow night. The place will be rocking. Persian is playing. I hope you register to do a memoir. To tell us your clubbing experience. I hope you join our army. This is a revolution. There’s a line in our Fountian of Youth Poem, I took for Barrie George’s story: ‘no more parting for the white guys.’ A fight, a moment of revolution that directly led to the Reno being born. Looking back now I realise the Reno was a movement. For me it was a way, in a mad way, to be a feminist, inside the boundaries that came with my birth. Unorthodox, unconventional, but when you are that age you don’t give a fuck about the rules. Wouldn’t it be nice to feel like that again? The new motto is ‘no more parting for the middle class.’  The Whitworth is a public space. Come, join us, make use of that. Come with ideas. That expand ours. We can do anything now.

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